Villains are en vogue. On the heels of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn, and walking a path charted by the late Adult Swim series The Venture Bros., Hulu’s new comedy MODOK imagines the trials and tribulations of being a Mobile Organism Designed Only for Killing. Thankfully, the story exists completely outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in a world where writer-actor Patton Oswalt can go in all sorts of zany directions.
At the 2020 New York Comic Con, Oswalt and co-creator Jordan Bum took the stage to lay out their vision for the zany take on Marvel villainy.
“He’s a supervillain who hates the Marvel heroes, but also hates all the other villains,” Oswalt explained in the panel. “He’s not even D-level. He’s G. It’s just double-barreled resentment in every episode.”
Blum added a tease of the setup: “MODOK is hellbent on taking over the world with science with his evil organization AIM […] and in our show, MODOK has spent years trying to do this, but he’s run his evil organization into the ground.”
While the creators were tight-lipped over the actual plots in store for MODOK, Oswalt was cavalier enough to say that they’d be drawing from all over the Marvel universe — including from X-Men comics — to find characters who are worthy of menacing the menacer.
MODOK does not currently have a release date, but fans of Marvel can get a taste of the comedy in the first clip, which premiered during the panel.